Ian Burn has been described as many things: an activist, a trade-unionist, a journalist, an art critic, a curator and an art historian—and, as he once described himself in a moment of self-deprecating alienation, ‘an exConceptual artist’.

This volume brings together a diverse collection of Burn’s writings that reveals a probing, analytical artist who turned to language to articulate the need for ‘looking at seeing and reading’, who pursued a Marxist politics in the face of neoliberalism and who sought to occupy and transform the margins of landscape painting.

The catalogue brings together previously unpublished material and offers a prescient rethinking of art in a decentered world through what Ian Burn called ‘peripheral vision’.

Ian Burn was a conceptual artist, curator and writer who spent the first part of his career working in London and New York.

Co-published with KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin.

Ian Burn was a member of Art & Language.